For the last year, Santa Clara District Attorney Peter Waite has been pursuing felony assault charges against two Asian Palo Alto police officers for subduing a black man whose suspicious behavior had prompted citizen calls for investigation. During the officers’ trial, which recently ended in a hung jury, prosecutor Waite grossly misapplied California law, and he did so for explicitly racist reasons, insisting that police officers must treat blacks differently than whites. Waite will decide by the end of this month whether to retry the two officers. People who care about justice need to pay attention, and stop this travesty from proceeding any further.

The law

California has the same basic statutes as other states. It has an “obstructing” statute (penal code section 148a) that makes it a crime to obstruct a peace officer in the performance of his duties, and it has an “arrest” statute (section 836) which says that an officer must have “probable cause to believe that the person to be arrested has committed a public offense” before he is allowed to bring the person under control. These two statutes often work as a one-two punch. If a person obstructs a police investigation, he has committed an “obstructing” offense, which gives an officer grounds for arrest. Once arrest has commenced, if the arrestee resists the arrest, that adds a “resisting” charge (also under 148a).

The case

These fairly common circumstances—where a person who the police are investigating obstructs the investigation, and is arrested for obstruction—describe the California case in question. Palo Alto police had good reason to question the black man, one Albert Hopkins, who had been huddling beneath the dashboard of his car. A scared woman had flagged down officer Craig Lee’s police cruiser to report Hopkins’ suspicious behavior, and an alarmed neighbor did the same. Hopkins obstructed the police investigation of his behavior by first being physically aggressive (shoving the door of his car open at officer Lee, who was first to approach), then verbally belligerent (f-wording the police for daring to question him), then giving misleading information (first claiming he didn’t have a driver’s license, then claiming he couldn’t find it), and finally by being physically uncooperative (refusing to get out of his car when officer Lee, together with back-up officer Michael Kan, ordered him to). When the officers next thought they saw Hopkins fishing for something inside his car, they feared he might be reaching for a weapon and tried to pull him from his car. Hopkins started fighting, yanking one of the officers into the car with him, and the officers fought back. They pulled Hopkins out of his car and used graduated force (pepper spray, then batons) to subdue him.

Palo Alto

Albert Hopkins should have been prosecuted for obstructing a police investigation and for resisting his arrest on that obstruction charge, but Palo Alto immediately acceded to Hopkins’ claim that “his only crime was sitting in a car while black.” Criminal charges against Hopkins were dropped and Palo Alto officially declared fault by quickly paying Hopkins a quarter million dollars to settle his civil suit against the city for police brutality.

Waite should be disbarred

Palo Alto’s failure to prefer obstructing charges gave Santa Clara prosecutors the opening they needed to misrepresent the law. If Hopkins was not obstructing, then on what grounds were the officers arresting him? With obstructing out of the loop, District Attorney Waite pretended that the pre-condition for officers Lee and Kan to bring Hopkins under control was that they had to have reason to believe that he had committed some crime other than obstruction of a police investigation. Here is how the P.A. Weekly covered Waite’s statement on this point: “A legal detention requires the officers to believe Hopkins might have committed a specific crime, Waite argued. ‘If you ignore that fact, if you make it a mere technicality, why not shoot Hopkins in the head?’” (Yes, that is typical Peter-Waite speak.)

Waite also made clear that by a “specific crime,” he meant a crime Hopkins had been committing before he was engaged by the police. Again, as reported by the P.A. Weekly: “Waite shocked the courtroom by stating the beating Lee and Kan gave 59-year-old Albert Hopkins in 2003 was in some ways worse than the thrashing [Rodney] King received from a group of Los Angeles police officers in 1991. Unlike Hopkins, Waite argued, King committed a crime—drunk driving. ‘At least King deserved some of that beating,’ Waite said.”

If Waite had stated explicitly that the “specific crime” the police are reacting to when they make an arrest has to be some crime that was committed before the police arrive, he would be disbarred. Making the same claim by referencing the crimes that Rodney King committed prior to obstructing and resisting is just a slippery way of doing the same thing.

Waite’s racism

Waite’s reasons for pursuing this grotesque misapplication of the law are explicitly racist. According to The San Francisco Chronicle: “Prosecutor Waite argued that police never had a legal justification to detain Hopkins and should have ended their ‘consensual’ questioning as soon as the man told them to stop hassling him because he was black.” It should make absolutely no difference what kind of racial smokescreen a legitimate object of investigation blows at the police. If I was huddled in my car, popping up and frightening women passersby, would the police have to stop questioning me if I said: “Stop hassling me because I’m white”? Of course not, and Waite agrees.

According to Waite, only blacks are exempt from questioning. In court, Waite urged the jury to disregard testimony by non-blacks. According to the Weekly’s court reporter, Waite “constantly insinuated the two concerned residents were acting due to their racial biases. ‘Palo Alto, it’s the kind of place where citizens—as is their legal right to do—call in black people that are walking down the street or sitting in their car,’ Waite said in his opening statement.” i.e. The police should not treat citizen calls for investigation the same when blacks are involved.

Peter Waite is a flat-out flaming racist. He criminally misapplied the law for explicitly racist reasons. He tried to racially intimidate the jury by raising the prospect of Rodney-King type riots. He accused white witnesses of being inherently racist. Then he topped it all off by accusing the Asian jurors who stuck up for Kan and Lee of being racially motivated. How DARE they not be buffaloed by Waite’s racial demagoguery?

A new extension of affirmative action

Is the Bay Area’s large Asian community finally going to wake up and say “enough”? It is well understood by now that affirmative action in academia takes admission spots almost exclusively from Asians and gives them to blacks. Waite wants to take this a step further. Instead of Hopkins going to jail, the Bay Area’s affirmative action leftists want to put two law abiding Asian men there in his stead. If that isn’t enough to stir the Asian community to some kind of interest, I’m sure our left-wing race-bigots have plenty more in store.